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In an interview in our Sunday Points section, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price is blunt in explaining his role in the ouster of Bruce Sherbet, the longtime Dallas County elections administrator.

Sherbet, he says, “told someone that he heard there was some displeasure with his performance and that if we wanted him gone, all we had to do is ask him. So, I asked him.”

Price, a Democrat, essentially accuses Sherbet of being a pawn of the Republican Party.

For example, he says the elections chief was slow to dispatch monitors to check on complaints of voting problems in heavily Democratic — and heavily minority — precincts.

He also says Sherbet dragged his feet on helping new voters register — because, in Dallas County, more new voters would mean more Democratic voters.

“Do you realize that Dallas County ranks in the bottom 10 of Texas counties in the rate of registered voters relative to its population?” Price says. “Whose duty is that? We have fewer voters registered now than we did in 1998. Republicans don’t want to see more registered voters. The demographics are changing, and they know that. C’mon, we know what is going on.”

For the record, Sherbet has emphatically denied running his office in a partisan way. It’s Price, he says — along with Democrat Clay Jenkins, the new county judge — who injected politics into the evaluation of the elections department.

“It wasn’t a shock to me that I faced a situation like this one,” he writes. “People in my position are susceptible to being replaced when there is a political power shift. What I do take exception to is the political spin that continues to linger over my resignation. Why can’t the people involved just tell the truth? That is all I have tried to do.”